Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)

[Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>]

Hi Martin

[[I'm not following your train of thought. Yes, what humans do WITHIN THE PROCESSES OF LIFE ACTIVITIES certainly becomes routinized. But how does this connect to "reified ideals"?]] 

Please let's keep the discussion within its limits ; expanding it causes misunderstanding . Within our limits , here , 'routinized' means 'reified' . On the object plane , the changing of gears become routinized , you're no longer on it , it's been thrown out of consciousness like many other things within your car not within your focus of attention , unnoticed . Hence unMOTIVATED / INACTIVATED . Because there's no need for them to be mobilized . 
This is the same with , say , buying bread . It's not the case that each time you focus on your being hungry or assign yourself a particular time of the day or night to think about your being hungry so that you're motivated to think about social reproduction and the survival of the mankind or generation ; then idealizing the related division of labour ; and the part you've been allocated , that is , to provide bread for the family (action and operation) . The problem with you is that you think of 'automaticality' as being equal to having piles and piles of bread stored within the house because of that automaticity . You might have been thinking of one thousand other things during the one hour ; then just at the entering the door , you see yourself holding loaves of bread in your hand . Compare it with providing bread for a banquette . 

[[I can't find that phrase in Leontiev's chapter 3.5.]] 

If you mean the phrase 'ideal , being reified , is no longer ideal' . I think it's MINE literally . 
First , I just had time to review 'the concept of the ideal' . The result is the many paragraphs you see down here . They hopefully testify to its being correct . Some paragraphs deal with other ideas discussed before on this thread like what Michael wanted to know . Andy will be up to me because of the lengthy quote and message . No way out , Andy :-) 
Second , long ago , I put this to the Israeli Colleague (memory failure) who knows a lot about 'ideality' , he Oked it . You might be willing to discuss with him .  Victor Odaysis , I suppose .
Third , Brecht on his explications upon Marx's THESES ON FEUERBACH , came up with one brilliant quote from Marx to the effect that 'the beginning is living process , activity ; in the end , finish , product , ?!  I could not find it . May Brecht or Andy resend it ? In relation to the Objectification / Deobjectification processes . 

[[ I've been thinking that activity is defined by a motive, which could be an ideal but not necessarily so. (That's why I quoted Marx: I presume we'd agree that production is an activity? According to Marx production can be motivated by a mental image, a need, a desire...  But I repeat myself.) ]]


If you read the paragraphs carefully , which is crystal clear , you will get a bright picture . That will be the same with L . 

[[Are you suggesting that once an activity's actions are routinized, it is no longer an activity?]]


YES , YES . Please read the INTERNAL transformations of an activity to the end of 3.5 hopefully . In the end , we have a product , a thing , a object , How could we call it an activity cycle , then ? Both 'ideality' and along with it 'the activity' are gone . If just one activity continually reproduces itself , what happens to the life , to the man , to the world , then ? Hierarchy of motives and levels of activity are up , too . 

And are you suggesting that having a baby becomes routine and automatic? I would imagine one would have to have a lot of babies for that to occur!  : )


How nice you portray it , Martin :-) ?   IT DEPENDS ON THE 'SOCIAL' NEED .  In Germany , they say there's the SOCIAL NEED for proliferation ? What about Canada , then ? If there IS , go to help them with the activity .  The ideality , the motivation and the activity of this phenomenon is to be found in , say , India ? My relative has 10 , numerous dead ?! but socially they need more soldiers ?? and think of what passes in China ? In this relation , other factors to be discussed .

Best
Haydi

Martin




For this reason in the vocabulary of modern materialistic psychology 
(and not only philosophy) the category of ‘ideality’ or the ‘ideal’ defines 
not mental activity in general, but only a certain phenomenon connected, 
of course, with mental activity, but by no means merging with it. 


‘Ideality mainly characterises the idea or image insofar as they, becom-ing objectivised in words’ [entering into the system of socially evolved 
knowledge which for the individual is something that is given for him. – 
E.V.I.], ‘in objective reality, thus acquire a relative independence, separat-ing themselves, as it were, from the mental activity of the individual’, 
writes the Soviet psychologist S. L. Rubinstein. 

Only in this interpretation does the category of ‘ideality’ become a 
specifically meaningful definition of a certain category of phenomena, 
establishing the form of the process of reflection of objective reality in 
mental activity, which is social and human in its origin and essence, in the 
social-human consciousness, and ceases to be an unnecessary synonym 
for mental activity in general. 


With reference to the quotation from S. L. Rubinstein’s book it need 
only be observed that the image is objectivised not only in words, and 
may enter into the system of socially evolved knowledge not only in its 
verbal expression. The image is objectivised just as well (and even more 
directly) in sculptural, graphic and plastic forms and in the form of the 
routine-ritual ways of dealing with things and people, so that it is ex-pressed not only in words, in speechand language, but also in drawings, 
models and such symbolic objects ascoats of arms, banners, dress, utensils, or as money, including gold coins and paper money, IOUs, 
bonds or credit notes.
***
In other words, what is ‘represented’ here as a thingis the form of 
people’s activity, the form of life activity which they perform together, 
which has taken shape ‘behind the back of consciousness’ and is materi-ally established in the form of the relationship between things described 
above. 
***
It is here that we find the answer to the riddle of ‘ideality’. Ideality, 
according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity 
represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity 
represented as a thing, as an object. 
***
‘Ideality’ constantly escapes, slips away from the 
metaphysically single-valued theoretical fixation. As soon as it is fixed as 
the ‘form of the thing’ it begins to tease the theoretician with its ‘immate-riality’, its ‘functional’ character and appears only as a form of ‘pure 
activity’. On the other hand, as soon as one attempts to fix it ‘as such’, as 
purified of all the traces of palpable corporeality, it turns out that this 
attempt is fundamentally doomed to failure, that after such a purification 
there will be nothing but phantasmal emptiness, an indefinable vacuum. 
***
And indeed, as Hegel understood so well, it is absurd to speak of ‘ac-tivity’ that is not realised in anything definite, is not ‘embodied’ in some-thing corporeal, if only in words, speech, language. If such ‘activity’ 

exists, it cannot be in reality but only in possibility, only potentially, and, 
therefore, not as activity but as its opposite, as inactivity, as the absence of 
activity. 
***
Man is quite a different matter. The child that has just been born is 
confronted – outside itself – not only by the external world, but also by a 
very complex system of culture, which requires of him ‘modes of behav-iour’ for which there is genetically (morphologically) ‘no code’ in his 
body. Here it is not a matter of adjusting ready-made patterns of behaviour, but 
of assimilating modes of life activity that do not bear any relationship at all to 
the biologically necessary forms of the reactions of his organism to things 
and situations. 
***
This applies even to the ‘behaviouralacts’ directly connected with the 
satisfaction of biologically inborn needs: the need for food is biologically 
encoded in man, but the need to eat it with the help of a plate, knife, fork 
and spoon, sitting on a chair, at a table, etc., etc., is no more congenital in 
him than the syntactical forms of the language in which he learns to 
speak. In relation to the morphology of the human body these are as 
purely and externally conventional as the rules of chess. 
***
The existence of this specifically human object – the world of things 
created by man for man, and, therefore, things whose forms are reified 
forms of human activity (labour), and certainly not the forms naturally inher-ent in them – is the condition for the existence of consciousness and will. And 
certainly not the reverse, it is notconsciousness and will that are the 
condition and prerequisite for the existence of this unique object, let 
alone its ‘cause’. 
***
The ideal form is the form of a thing created by social human labour. 
Or, conversely, the form of labour realised in the substance of nature, 
‘embodied’ in it, ‘alienated’ in it, ‘realised’ in it and, therefore, presenting 
itself to man the creator as the form of a thing or a relationship between 
things in which man, his labour, has placed them. 
***
For this reason the ‘ideal’ exists only in man. Outside man and beyond 
him there can be nothing ‘ideal’. Man,however, is to be understood not 
as one individual with a brain, but as a real aggregate of real people 
collectively realising their specifically human life activity, as the ‘aggregate 
of all social relations’ arising between people around one common task, 
around the process of the social production of their life. It is ‘inside’ man 
thus understood that the ideal exists, because ‘inside’ man thus understood are 
all the thingsthat ‘mediate’ the individuals that are socially producing their 
life: words, books, statues, churches, community centres, television towers, and (above 
all!) the instruments of labour, from the stone axe and the bone needle to the 
modern automated factory and the computer. It is in these ‘things’ that 
the ideal exists as the ‘subjective’, purposeful form-creating life activity of 
social man, embodied in the material of nature. 
***
The form of the thing created by man, taken out of the process of social life activity, out of the process of man-nature metabolism, also turns out to be simply the material form of the thing, the physical shape of an external body and nothing more. A word, taken out of the organism of human intercourse, turns out to be nothing more than an acoustic or optical phenomenon. “In itself” it is no more “ideal” than the human brain.


END OF QUOTES 

________________________________
 From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To: Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>; "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
Sent: Tuesday, 16 April 2013, 3:45:23
Subject: Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)
 


Hi Haydi,


I'm not following your train of thought. Yes, what humans do certainly becomes routinized. But how does this connect to "reified ideals"? I can't find that phrase in Leontiev's chapter 3.5.  I've been thinking that activity is defined by a motive, which could be an ideal but not necessarily so. (That's why I quoted Marx: I presume we'd agree that production is an activity? According to Marx production can be motivated by a mental image, a need, a desire...  But I repeat myself.)


Are you suggesting that once an activity's actions are routinized, it is no longer an activity?


And are you suggesting that having a baby becomes routine and automatic? I would imagine one would have to have a lot of babies for that to occur!  : )


Martin


On Apr 15, 2013, at 5:30 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com> wrote:


> Martin

> 

> There are many factors involved in this article .

> 

> In 3.5 of L's book , there's an example of the activity of 'driving' . Please read it again . First when you concentrate on changing gears , as it is conscious , it can be considered moment of activity . But when you change this goal , and think of speeding the car so that you might reach the destination , you no longer think of the changing of the gears . You AUTOMATICALLY  do it and it is removed from your consciousness as a goal . And please do remember that reified ideals are no longer ideal and that without 'ideality' you cannot involve in a activity cycle or generally in the FLOW of activities which L prefers to call it the 'sum total' of life itself . 

> 

> The routinized autonomic act of reproduction of generations need not to be activated / motivated generally . 

> 

> Finished products are there all the time ; at one certain point , they begin to reach the status of being an object to an activity ; while before being reified , all living material spiritual condition of an activity were true about them . Now , everything is extinct . 

> 

> I wonder if I can call it a reverse activity . At its normal state , if it is natural or social , is to be discussed . Though exhaustion prevails .  

> 

> I mean some activity was stopped because of the many factors involved in the situation and in relation to two different locations mentioned in the article . 

> 

> The NEED arose as to find ways to remove the hindrances and obstacles in the way of 'productivity' . 

> 

> This need motivated and now is motivating those involved to plan for actions ; actions , according to the article , are under way .

> 

> Conditions are also weighed down so that they will see if there are hopes for realization of the goals of the actions . 

> 

> THIS IS THE ACTIVITY OF REACHING LOW/HIGH RATE OF, RELATIVE / ABSOLUTE (NORMAL / PERFECT) FERTILITY . 

> 

> Best

> Haydi

> 

> 

> ________________________________

> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>

> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 

> Sent: Monday, 15 April 2013, 2:03:02

> Subject: Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)

> 

> 

> 

> How's this for a neat example of the role of inorganic and organic cycles in the human activity/project of reproduction!

> 

> 

> This from ethnography with the Abelam, who avoid sexual activity during the giant yam-growing season because it would upset the yams. The consequence is that no babies are born May through July.

> 

> 

> (I assume we can all agree that having a baby is a collaborative activity/project, motivated by human needs and involving various goal-directed actions? Or is this too base and animalistic an analysis?)

> 

> 

> Martin

> 

> 

> [cid:9559E85F-F2FC-4E6C-8BD4-7A77B5FB095C]

> 

> Condon, R. G., & Scaglion, R. (1982). The ecology of human birth seasonally. Human Ecology, 10(4), 495-511. doi:10.1007/BF01531169

> 

> 

> 

> 

> 

> __________________________________________

> 

> _____

> 

> xmca mailing list

> 

> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu

> 

> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

> __________________________________________

> _____

> xmca mailing list

> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu

> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

>
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca